Hey look a new book on Irrlicht!

What it covers:

• Detailed information on setting up your dev environment (covers Windows, linux and OSX)
• Basic overview of the engine accompanied by some simple example code.  I don’t think the longest code example is more than two pages.
• Using sprite sheets
• Using CopperTube to export a scene with lighting
• Using ScapeMaker (I’d never even heard of that tool before)  to generate a terrain and how to render it
• Quick if a bit shallow tutorials on getting things like particles, mesh loading, etc

Ha, it mentions Ludumdare in passing, one of the examples require a sprite sheet image from “A Practical Survival Guide for Robots” and gives an LD url to get it.

What it doesn’t cover:

• Any hard/tricky stuff
• Dynamically doing stuff like shooting bullets and making real-time changes to the scenegraph
• Advanced collision or advanced anything
• Bringing it all together in a simple game like pong or something
• Detailed info and gotchas

So there you have it, it does what it says on the tin: a no-nonsense, well illustrated, beginner’s guide.  Only useful for those absolutely new to Irrlicht – very quickly you’d want to switch to the real tutorials to go deeper.

The thing is, if you really have the required skills to develop a 3d game with Irrlicht, you probably aren’t going to be hung up on issues like understanding model formats or adding library paths to MSVC++.  Now where is the advanced book…

Seth’s rating: [3.5/5] duck heads

Disclosure: Packt Publishing sent me this book for review

Irrlicht 1.7 Realtime 3D Engine Beginner’s Guide
Paperback : 272 pages [ 235mm x 191mm ]
Release Date : October 2011
ISBN : 1849513988
Author(s) : Johannes Stein, Aung Sithu Kyaw